--- S U S A N   H .  M A U R E R

When you love me
I see I jump, convulse
scarecrow in wind
Bird on a high tension wire
Patient biting the tongue clamp
After shock
Spasms more like a final jig
That what once seemed good
As simple things, warm ones
Hot soup or fondly rumpled sheets
Marked, creased with you
Now that you are gone
I watched them as I go around the room
I force everything into my fingers
Center my will in my finger tips
Shove, push, bend, in my mind
Stiff paper into funeral boats
Three-cornered hats
Triangled cranes
Sharp sided bears
Stiff-legged bears
With locked corners
burn them, my feelings
Try  to murder them by
Reducing them to detail
To the three times distanced
Abstraction
Of writing about them as
Paper, as burnt in my mind
A large ash, cinder
This as an onion skin
Arches in the flame
Fragile, shining for a second
The smell of burning hair
Stabs me.